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O P I N I O N
Business and burgers
It might seem far fetched, but it’s true. AEC firms can learn a thing or two from the fast- food industry.
I watched a movie the other day that I enjoyed for all the wrong reasons. The movie was The Founder , and its plot centered on Ray Kroc, the legendarily opportunistic entrepreneur who took the McDonald brothers’ idea for an efficiently-run burger stand and transformed it into a global food brand, virtually creating the fast-food industry in the process.
David Coyne GUEST SPEAKER
an otherwise nondescript burger stand in San Bernardino, California, producing burgers and shakes with the assembly-line mechanics of a Ford auto plant. And the results were similar – a good- quality product delivered quickly and cheaply. By far the most interesting scene in the movie “All professional services firms can embody these efficiency models to their own business, just as the McDonald brothers did more than 70 years ago.”
Kroc had a rare talent for deals, and the movie primarily chronicles his empire-building in this light. But I was instead transfixed by a core concept that could still have relevance to us in the AEC industry, all these years later. In fact, it’s what actually drove Kroc to expand the business model in the first place – the efficient operational design accomplished by the McDonald brothers a decade earlier. By all accounts, process efficiency was not a new idea by the mid-20th century. Operational design had formed the basis of successful business empires of all types dating back to the Industrial Revolution, but what the McDonald brothers accomplished was the application of such efficiencies to food service. Here it was,
See DAVID COYNE, page 10
THE ZWEIG LETTER March 11, 2019, ISSUE 1287
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